Navy Wins Defense Budget Superbowl

Loren Thompson
, ContributorI write about national security, especially its business dimensions.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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Among the world's major-league military players, there isn't much doubt which team dominates. It's Team America, which outspends the next dozen or so countries combined on military talent and technology. But that doesn't mean everybody on the U.S. team fares equally well -- the fortunes of particular military services and defense agencies vary a lot from year to year depending on how the great game of global politics is unfolding.

So every year, military observers around the world eagerly await the roll-out of the new U.S. defense budget, to see who the winners and losers are. The budget may not deliver as definitive a verdict as wars do, but it's a good indicator of who management expects the coming decade's most valuable player to be. And even though the fiscal 2013 budget request won't be released until next week, it is already clear who will be crowned MVP for the remainder of the Obama era: It's the U.S. Navy.

Just look at what we already know. U.S. troops are out of Iraq. Al Qaeda is on the ropes (sorry to mix sports metaphors). NATO allies are discussing an early turnover of security responsibilities in Afghanistan to the Kabul government. Thus, the big land campaigns that gave the Army a disproportionate share of military outlays after 9-11 are coming to an end.

Now look at the new military posture the administration unveiled on January 3. The Pentagon calls it an "Asia-Pacific" posture, because the military is shifting its strategic focus to the littoral areas of East Asia -- a place where the sea services have far more warfighting options than land-based forces do. The white paper released with the new posture says that America will remain engaged in the Middle East, but rely increasingly on maritime forces to accomplish its goals.

Meanwhile in Europe -- a continent where land power has traditionally dominated military calculations -- the administration says the U.S. role must "evolve," which is a euphemism for shrinking. The plan for the rest of the world is to sustain a minimal U.S. presence by working through local partners and providing military assistance. America will keep watch from overhead, but it will have few troops on the ground other than advisors. If troubles flare, the sea services are likely to show up first.

Just in case Congress and military planners didn't get the point about where the administration's New Look is leading, on January 26 Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta disclosed the funding priorities associated with the Asia-Pacific posture. The Army loses eight brigades and stretches out what little is left of its long-term investment agenda for new weapons. Two of its brigades in Europe are eliminated.

The Air Force gets to keep its next-generation fighter and tanker programs while beginning work on a new bomber, but 280 planes are removed from its fleet over the next five years, including a hundred A-10 tank killers that originally were bought to support ground forces. The number of airlifters is cut because conventional warfighting goals have been scaled back; there is no program to replace aging radar planes; and the fighter program is slowed so much that legacy fighters will need to receive structural fixes so they can fill the gap until new planes arrive.

The sea services fare much better in the January 26 priorities. The administration commits itself to sustaining the current force of eleven large-deck aircraft carriers and ten carrier air wings. It also says it will preserve the amphibious fleet that enables the Marines to conduct forcible-entry operations. And it makes surface warships equipped with the Aegis combat system the centerpiece of future missile-defense efforts. Important new land-attack missions are assigned to the submarine fleet too. The size of the Marine Corps is trimmed by 20,000 personnel, but that is much less than the 80,000 soldiers being cut from the Army.

The administration will say that it is making balanced cuts across all the military services, and in fact the number of warships the Navy had planned to build over the next five years is being cut significantly -- from over 50 to barely 40. However, if you look at how those reductions are being implemented, the Navy loses almost nothing in the way of real fighting capability -- the most important surface vessels that were deleted are simply shifted to future years, so there is little long-term impact on Navy plans. And unlike in the case of the land-based services, the administration is planning to expand the Navy's overseas presence in places like Singapore.

Although some decline in Army capabilities was expected as the nation extricated itself from foreign counter-insurgency campaigns, it's a little harder to understand the Air Force's relatively weak showing in the new spending priorities. After all, long-range air power is the most potent solution to the tyranny of distance in the Western Pacific, and a bomber or a fighter refueled in flight by one of the Air Force's new tankers is likely to get to hot spots a lot sooner than a warship. However, the problem is that the Air Force needs bases at which to land when it arrives, whereas the sea services bring their bases with them in the form of aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships (which look like small aircraft carriers).

The Marine Corps has made the most of this asymmetry by developing a new generation of jumpjets based on the same next-generation F-35 fighter the Air Force and Navy will be buying. Its use of legacy Harrier jumpjets in the Libyan crisis demonstrated that relatively short-legged planes can make a big difference in a military operation if they have floating sea bases nearby. But that option is not available to the Air Force, and so lack of access to nearby land bases in some parts of Asia has limited the role it can play in the new posture.

Of course, it still has a vital role to play in providing overhead intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance to the other services as the lead military service for space. But it could have bolstered that role in the Pacific by continuing to purchase long-endurance Global Hawk unmanned surveillance drones, and instead it has decided to kill the program, put the drones it already has in storage, and continue relying on the venerable U-2 spy plane -- not the obvious choice for a region where huge distances drive military choices.